I was recently interviewed about PhD2Published for the excellent blog Adventures in Career Development by Tristram Hooley. It was great to reflect on how PhD2Published started and has grown over the last eighteen months or so. And I was really honoured Tristram was interested in the project.
My interview starts like this:
AiCD: Who are you?
My name is Dr Charlotte Frost I’m the 2011/2012 International Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for 21st Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I’m a broadcaster and academic interested in the relationship between art and technology. My particular specialism is the impact of digital technologies on art historical discourse, but I’ve also been studying and writing about the developing field of Digital and New Media art for over ten years. I teach art contextual modules at Writtle School of Design and the University of Westminster. And I run a range of projects that support my research objectives while creating platforms for knowledge exchange and experimentation – particularly with reference to publishing.
AiCD: Tell us a little bit about PhD2Published?
PhD2Published was started out of necessity. I didn’t know how to get my first academic book published, but I did know that it was something I needed to do. I began the site in a bid to find out about academic publishing. In line with many of the projects I’ve written about in the Digital and New Media arts arena, it came from an ‘open source’ ethos. That is, I felt that academic publishing was still very ‘closed source’, in the sense that methodologies were not being freely shared. I wanted to use myself as a ‘guinea pig’, and create some easy methods that others could use and pass on. More than that, I wanted to make a site that wasn’t just for reading, but could be actively used as a way of developing your career path. For example, post-docs can write for the site and get in touch with precisely the publishing entities relevant to their career path. They can get answers to questions important to them, all while introducing themselves to those entities well before they actually pitch their book. It’s a route to getting yourself on their radar. On top of this, I had planned that if the site worked and I landed my own book deal, I would let someone else lead it’s editorial direction and use it to repeat my results – and so on. So it’s a resource that’s built around peer-to-peer sharing, but it’s also an umbrella organisation early-career academics can strategically work under, and a peer-mentoring scheme.
And you can read the rest of the interview, where I talk about my approach to blogging and other projects I’m involved with here…
